Walkers in the City

For a long time, every night, police horses used to pass by down
on the street when it was very late and quiet—as quiet as it can be with the
subway and a firehouse around the corner—and their approach could be heard from
a distance before they reached my block. I thought of them last night very
late, as I sat reading beside the window and the sizzling radiator, about how
they don’t pass by anymore and how I’m not sure how long it’s been since they
did. Is it a year? Or more than that? I was finishing my last book of 2017, a very
pretty little book called Night Thoughts
by Wally Shawn with a picture of him on the cover. Like most of what I’ve read
of his or seen him perform onstage, Night
Thoughts had the effect of making me take up where he left off, on his
momentum, and ride off on thoughts of my own as replete with questions and
wonderings as his seem to be.

I was sitting with the book in my lap when I heard a plow
coming. No snow was falling and there was no snow on the street, but the plow came
anyway, grinding against the bare dark asphalt in a shower of golden-orange
sparks. Old subway trains came to mind, the way they squealed into the stations
like giant iron comic strips in showers of sparks like that, but in my memory those
sparks were blue, not orange. And I thought of my coffee wagon from that time, down
near the New York Stock Exchange, and my long-dead friend Charlie who worked it
with me. He was old school, a real Guido, and he loved to pretend to have intimate
married-people fights with me in front of customers he disliked. He would see one
of them float up out of the subway and as they neared our wagon he would be yelling,
“When I got the guys comin’ over to watch the game I don’t want them lookin’ at
your panties dryin’ in the john like that, aright?” Then he’d pretend he’d been
caught and enjoy their embarrassed expressions.

I thought about something a Dutch lady friend told me
yesterday, about a furry black dog she’d seen, as big as a pony, standing on the
end of a leash waiting for the light to change. A few nicely-dressed men were
gathered around the dog, talking, all wanting to pet him but being careful because
although he was magnificent, there hung from the corner of his mouth a thick
rope of slobber. She watched, wondering if the slobber would stay where it was
since it was freezing, but then the dog shook his big head and she saw the men
all jump back at once and check the fronts of their coats before each going
their separate ways.

When she told me about the slobber dog, I was reminded of
something that happened one night on Seventh Avenue a few years ago, and I told
her about it. It was a hot summer night and I came upon a police horse standing
unattended outside the deli on the corner. He looked at me and stamped one
foot. I stopped in front of his long face, which was brown with a white stripe,
and put out my hand to pet him. That’s when he stretched forth and wiped his
huge nose, which I had not noticed was very slick and drippy, against me from
my neck to my waist. And as he did, the cop who would normally have been sitting
on him emerged from the deli with two handfuls of paper towel. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed.
“I was just going to wipe his nose!” He apologized all over himself, stuffing
the paper towels into his pockets “for later,” and climbed back onto the horse.

There’s a remarkable dog I see around my neighborhood a lot,
a pretty golden retriever type of girl-dog who loves her man so much that she spends
a lot of time outside sitting upright on the sidewalk with her arms wrapped
around his legs. She hugs him very tightly and desperately, like an
old-fashioned goodbye scene at a railway station, and there is usually a gathering
of people standing around watching, and whenever I see them I wish I could know
exactly what the lady dog is thinking and feeling while she’s doing it, this curious embracing that can look so tragic and private.

On Christmas Day a handsome 19th century building
caught fire right next to the fire house. I stood with other people on the
corner and saw bright flames flickering within its old cornice of verdigris
copper at the rooftop. Everyone seemed to have been evacuated safely, so I went
home, but with the odd feeling that always comes with things being okay here
while being not okay just over there. My building has caught fire a few times,
and so far we’ve been lucky. Later I learned that among the tenants burned out
but unharmed in that fire was the lady dog and her man. How sad and how lucky!

My Dutch friend told me that something distinctive about New
York is the way we all talk to each other. New York, unlike Amsterdam, she said,
still has its Radio Trottoir—its pavement radio—meaning that we find out
a lot from overhearing talk on the street. I had never thought about that, although
it rang true as soon as she said it. “Don’t strangers talk on the street in
Amsterdam?” I asked her. “No,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t
anymore.”

“Why do you think we still do?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she
said. She told me that for her the fact that we do is one of the things that
sets New York City apart from all other cities, like the steam that pours out
from beneath its streets.

A few days ago I got
caught in a cloudburst and found myself right across the street from Flawless Sabrina’s house on East
73rd Street. Flawless Sabrina, aka Jack Doroshow, is someone I am always very happy
to see, but my aversion to just dropping in on someone unannounced kept me from ringing
her bell.

She has had the same apartment since she first came as a fabulous
queen to the city in 1967. It’s not big, but the rooms in it are poems full of gold and silver light, worthy of Harun
al-Rashid. I waited out the rain in a dry spot, imagining Flawless sitting in one of those glittering rooms
inside her pretty building, thinking of my first visit to her. I remember staring at the ceiling, which is embossed with gold leaf
that Flawless said is actually tin foil that she and her brother stuck there one
summer, long ago. I remember her telling me what an uppity, snobby, mean, and angry queen she had been for a long
time. “Is that true?” I asked, because to me over the years she’s never
been anything but warmth and kindness. “Oh!” she shouted. “I was furious! Furious! And my ears, so close to my
mouth, listened to that shit for years! Fucking Hell! And years of high
heels! Oh, my God! You should see my feet!
Holy Christ! Oh, my God, they’re knarled! I wore a size four, but it was a size twelve foot I was putting in ‘em!”

Flawless said that if
she were a tchotchke in a shop window, she would be labeled “Late Deco,” for
having first opened her peepers in 1939. She told about being born in a South
Philly slum five days after Hitler marched into Poland. She said peace is an
aberration because there have been wars all her life. She told about the
streets of South Philly and how they were a feast for the eye, always in a
vapor of coal dust and how, during the war, there were rations and coupons but
thanks to the mobsters the food they got was fantastic. The best steaks and
the best olive oil.She said the
neighborhood was full of gangsters and kids and church ladies. On Sundays, her
grandmother invited the priest to come over for dinner. So as a kid, Flawless
got to ask him questions all about idolatry and the Catholic habit of going
into a little wooden booth and chatting up the guy sitting in it about whatever
you did wrong and getting the little assignment that wiped the whole slate
clean, which Flawless thought was a pretty good deal.

She told me about her
mother and how she drilled into her kids’ heads the importance of having a
positive outlook like a broken record. ‘You gotta be positive, you gotta be positive,
you gotta be positive.’

Yes, but Mother! What
about the negativity?‘You gotta be
positive!'‘But Mother, surely
it should be nuanced.’

'No, I think not.'

I
think the reptilian brain will more than make up for the differential!

The rain stopped as
suddenly as it had started and the sun came out. I walked all the way downtown to the farmers market to buy some tomatoes, thinking of Flawless. She said that if you have the eyes of a child you stay curious and you get curiouser and curiouser and that one of the downsides of that is that you can be easily fooled. Then she said that she hoped her best quality was that of being a fool. She said, “I would certainly hope that I’m hardwired with fool. Yes, please!” She said she thinks ‘success’ is horseshit because it’s a moving target that can’t be hit and that significance is all that matters in life.

Once in the market, I was reminded of a very unpleasant lady I encountered there once, standing behind a big pyramid of
tomatoes next to a weighing scale. Her tomatoes were arranged so perfectly that I thought I should ask her for two rather than touch them. And when I did, she snapped: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you will have to get
them yourself, just like everybody else. We’re not here to do everything for
you.”

This took me by surprise and I felt immediately embarrassed. The man next to me turned to
have a look at me, and so did the other three or four people gathered around.
The lady looked at the man and shrugged, as if certain that he would sympathize
with the kind of crap she had to put up with, and said, "I can help whoever's next."

I was wearing a cape
and my left arm was underneath it, invisible. Hanging on my right arm was my shopping bag full of other things, and in
my right hand, my billfold. All at once I had an inspiration. I said to the man beside me,“Would you mind
grabbing me two tomatoes? Any old two will do. I only have one arm, and I’d really appreciate it.”

The man's eyes got big. “Of
course," he said. "Of course!” He shot a look at the tomato lady, who had reddened upon suddenly finding herself the one embarrassed in front of all the people. “Oh gosh,” she said.
“I didn’t realize that you were handicapped! Why didn’t you say something?”
She fell all over herself as the man put two tomatoes in a bag for me while
my perfectly good left arm stayed under my cape doing nothing. I remembered Flawless Sabrina telling me how Andy Warhol used to say, “You’re the boss, applesauce,” to any kind of authority figure. I almost felt sorry for the lady, but she deserved it, and I felt lucky to have had the lame arm idea then and there rather than later.The rain started falling again as I walked home, and on both sides of the street umbrellas of
all different colors opened up at once.

Coming across 24th Street a few days ago, I thought
of an envelope that I saw lying on the dirty floor of the C train a while back.
Every now and then it rises up in my mind without any provocation and I’m sure
it will haunt me for the rest of my life. As I left the crowded train at 23rd
Street I happened to see the envelope, well out of reach, on which was written
in a shaky hand the words: “DO NOT LOSE.” The doors of the train banged shut
and that was that. Now I wondered, the way I always do when I think of it, if I
could have somehow gotten hold of the envelope, and then if I could have
somehow found the person who lost it. As I walked along thinking about it,
a man I know from the neighborhood stopped me on the sidewalk. He said he had
something sad to tell me, and I knew right away what he would say because there
was only one thing we had in common that could be sad, and that would be
something happening to Roberta Peters. And indeed, she had died the day before,
but very peacefully, and after the long and charmed life he knew she had lived.
He told me that the previous Sunday was the last time he took her for a walk,
which she had enjoyed the way she enjoyed every walk in this neighborhood where
she lived and was such marvelous presence. The man was for a long time the hired
walker for this very fine old lady dog, whom everyone called Bobbie, and he
would always say how lucky he felt to have that privilege. I always wondered about
the person who actually lived with her, the person who had named her after the
famous opera singer, and imagined that whoever it was must be a very big Roberta Peters
fan. When I was a child we had a few of her records in the house that my
mother had inherited from a lady who gave her a whole collection of operas,
which was why I knew right away who Bobbie’s namesake was when the man first
introduced us.

Wonderful Roberta Peters "Bobbie"on 7th Avenue 2017

Whenever we happened to meet outside on the street somewhere I
always stopped to pet Bobbie and tell her how much I loved her, and the last time
that happened I took her picture. I felt sad to learn that she had passed,
but in the way that we feel sad for any person who dies at the age of 100 after
a wonderful earthly existence. We know it’s not a tragedy when that happens, so
why does it chafe and stab at the heart so?

There was for a long time a fierce little longhaired Chihuahua
who lived on 20th Street with a very old lady. They liked to spend
most of the day out on their stoop together when it wasn’t raining or freezing,
and the old lady had a voice that sounded (and still sounds) like she’d breathed in helium. That
dog barked his head off at every other dog who passed, no matter how big and
scary, and he terrorized the block. He was nice to me on the few occasions when
I reached out to pet him. The lady would say in her helium voice, “You gotta watch out, he tough,” while the dog accepted his pets. I was reminded of the two of them not long ago
when I read an article about the artist Leonor Fini in a magazine somewhere. I have in my house a
framed portrait of Leonor Fini’s white cat, taken by my friend Indra Tamang a long time ago in Paris. He told me about visiting her one day with Charles Henri Ford, and
how her apartment was full of cats. Apparently this particular big white cat always
lounged among the people whenever she entertained. When he
showed me the photograph I liked it so much that he gave it to me. Around that same time he also
showed me a postcard that Leonor Fini once sent to Charles. The picture was of
a cliff that looked to be formed in lava, and Fini had added to the top of it a
pair of cat’s ears and two sprays of whiskers with a pen. She was an extreme lover
of kitties, Leonor Fini was.

I bought a frame at the Utrecht art supply store on West 23rd
Street and put the photograph in it right there in the shop. Then I started towards home via 22nd
Street, and when I reached their stoop, there sat the old lady and her fierce
little dog. I stopped to show the lady
the photograph and she made a little squealing sound. “Oh, nice!” she exclaimed
in her helium voice, and as she did, the dog came down for a closer look. He
stared at Leonor Fini’s big white cat with his lips trembling. He began to
growl somewhere deep inside his chest. “Oh, my, he like that cat,” the lady
said, and then he exploded in barking at the photograph. It seemed to last a
very long time, my standing there holding the picture before the two of them, looking and barking from their stoop, and it’s a memory in color that I hope will
never fade. It’s been quite a long while since I’ve seen the dog, but I still see the
lady sitting out on the stoop, sometimes with another old lady in a housedress
who has a medium-sized poodle. I love the photo of Leonor Fini’s white cat.
Something about him always makes me think of the British actor Peter Ustinov,
and I imagine that they might have shared certain characteristics, each of them
looking the way they did.

The day after Bobbie’s walker told me she’d passed away, the
weather turned hot and humid, with an air quality alert. Her timing could not
have been better.